Suchergebnisse

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Table of Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Acknowledgements -- List of Contributors -- Introduction: Global Histories of Disability: Thinking about Power, Place and People -- PART I: Power -- 1 The Middle Passage, the Market, and the Plantation: Slavery-Induced Disability in the Eighteenth-Century Caribbean -- 2 'Able', 'Disabled' and 'Invalid' Labourers: Disability and Indenture in Mauritius and Natal, c. 1840-1910 -- 3 The Colonial Invention of Disability: The Politics of Disability and Productivity in Kenya, c. 1940-1970 -- PART II: Place -- 4 Policies for Disabled People in the French Colonies 1918-1962: Evolutions and Heterogeneity -- 5 Imperial Mobilities: Disability, Indigeneity, and the United States West, 1850-1920 -- 6 Accepting and Opposing Local Deaf Tradition. The Polish d/Deaf Community after the Fall of Communism: 1989-2014 -- PART III: People -- 7 Coup de soleil-William Baillie (1789-1869) and an Eastern (Mis)Adventure -- 8 "Unsightly and Unruly": The Visual and Legal Politics of Disability and Gender in US Ugly Laws, c. 1867-1920 -- Index.

Introduction: Thinking about disability, rethinking difference -- Disability and otherness in the British Empire : disablement as a discourse of difference -- Saving the other at home and overseas : philanthropy, education and the state -- 'A fearfully and wonderfully made individual' : exhibiting bodily anomaly -- Signs of humanity : language and civilisation -- A deaf imaginary : disability, nationhood and belonging in the 'British world' -- Immigration : racism, ableism and exclusion -- The health of the nation : class, race, gender and disability in imperial Britain.

Colonising Disability explores the construction and treatment of disability across Britain and its empire from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Esme Cleall explores how disability increasingly became associated with 'difference' and argues that it did so through intersecting with other categories of otherness such as race. Philanthropic, legal, literary, religious, medical, educational, eugenistic and parliamentary texts are examined to unpick representations of disability that, overtime, became pervasive with significant ramifications for disabled people. Cleall also uses multiple examples to show how disabled people navigated a wide range of experiences from 'freak shows' in Britain, to missions in India, to immigration systems in Australia, including exploring how they mobilised to resist discrimination and constitute their own identities. By assessing the intersection between disability and race, Dr Cleall opens up questions about 'normalcy' and the making of the imperial self.

Through their copious published writings, missionaries conveyed their experiences and anxieties about people and cultures they encountered in a much-consumed strand of colonial discourse, that allowed the British public to imagine the remote countries they inhabited. Using research that draws on these writings from missionaries in southern Africa and India, Missionary Discourses of Difference is organised into three important themes of imperial and postcolonial scholarship and major missionary concern: family, sickness and violence. Each thematic section considers both how missionaries represented race, religion, gender and culture and how their thinking was shaped by anxieties about their own experiences. This two-pronged approach allows for a sustained interrogation of the interplay between self and other in missionary writing and probes the limits of inclusion beneath the missionary commitment to universalism.

I first came across Harlan Lane's work towards the end of my PhD, which I was undertaking at University College London, UK. My dissertation was on the construction of "difference" in the British Empire, particularly the differences ascribed to race and gender. Using nineteenth-century medical missionaries as a way in, I had started to think about differences evoked by health, disability, and the body. In particular, I noted the way in which missionaries used the language of disability as a discourse of racialisation. The African and Indian colonial subjects they encountered were described throughout missionary literature as "deaf to the Word", "blind to the light" and "too lame" to walk alone. I have two d/Deaf cousins, one of whom is the sign language sociolinguist Nick Palfreyman, and around about this time Nick had started to familiarise me with some of the issues surrounding Deaf politics. Becoming interested and wanting to know more, I began to learn British Sign Language (BSL) and contemplate the connections between the historical work I was doing and contemporary struggles of Deaf politics and disability politics (I was particularly interested in DPAC - Disabled People Against Cuts - given the contemporary climate of austerity in the UK). As I did so I became acquainted with the work of Harlan Lane. Here, although acutely aware of my own positionality as a white, British, hearing woman, I have taken up the challenge set by the editors of this special issue to re-read his work twelve years on from my initial encounter with it, using the insights into postcolonial study I have gained through my historical work.

This article traces the way in which the language of displacement and silence were used in nineteenth-century discussions of deafness and connects this tendency to the marginalised place deaf experience occupies historically. Throughout the nineteenth century, a period which saw the consolidation of 'the deaf and dumb' as a social category, the word 'forgetting' crept into numerous discussions of deafness by both deaf and hearing commentators. Some, such as the educationalist Alexander Graeme Bell, were overt in their desire to forget deafness, demanding disability was 'bred out' and deaf culture condemned to the forgotten past. Others used the term ambivalently and sometimes metaphorically discussing the deaf as 'forgotten' by society, and 'children of silence'. Some even pleaded that people who were deaf were not forgotten. But, though varied, the use of the imagery of forgetting and silence to evoke deafness is recurrent, and may, therefore, be seen to reveal something about how deaf experience can be approached as a displacement where deafness was spatially and imaginatively marginalised. I argue that one of the consequences of the conceptual framing of deafness through the language of forgetting was actively to silence deafness and to neutralise the idea that disability should be marginal and could be forgotten.

This article argues that, despite strong metaphorical ties between deafness and the inability to connect, nineteenth-century deaf networks provide an excellent example of how ideas and identities circulated through transnational and transcolonial networks. Educational institutions facilitated the spread of signing. Deaf pedagogies were developed and contested across multiple sites. Ideologies of ableism (the privileging of the young non-disabled body) intersected with changing attitudes towards race. And embodied knowledges of deafness circulated as deaf individuals moved around the globe and formed transnational communities. Tracing deaf connections also enables us to think about the extent to which colonial networks intersected with networks in the US and continental Europe.

Heritage as Community Research explores the nature of contemporary heritage research involving university and community partners. Putting forward a new view of heritage as a process of research and involvement with the past, undertaken with or by the communities for whom it is relevant, the book uses a diverse range of case studies, with many chapters co-written between academics and community partners. Through this extensive work, the Editors show that the process of research itself can be an empowering force by which communities stake a claim in the places they live